Giving Credit Where It is Due

There are people who grab the limelight and those who do all the work. Unfortunately it is the first group that is remembered but they wouldn’t have been able to anything without the others. Wired came up with a great must read article on those who died in 2011 and weren’t called Steve.

New / Old Fedora Remix

There is a new remix of Fedora that has just been released. Koororaa is based on Fedora 14 KDE. It is actually a return of an old KDE remix but now it is based on Fedora.

It comes preinstalled with popular non-KDE apps such as Firefox and Gimp as well as having extra repos such as Flash and RPMFusion preconfigured. There is also a Lite version which can be used on basic machines such as netbooks or as the base for a customised system. There are 32 and 64 bit versions too. Both run as live versions so can be used without installation.

I have been experimenting with the standard version and was impressed with the included packages even though he has it tagged as a Beta version. I intend to install it on a system in the next few days and give it a further tryout.

The developer, Chris Smart, is an Australian based in Canberra so it is nice to see something this useful coming out of Oz. Have a look at his site at kororaa.org

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A More Detailed Map

This is one for Australians (and anyone interested in Australia too!) only at this stage. We are becoming used to photomaps with the option on Google Maps and others as well as Google Earth of course. One thing these have in common though is poor quality when you zoom right in.

There is an alternative for Australia with high quality images at least in the capitals and some of the regonial cities. The images are updated regularly and the previous images are easily accesible so you can see the changes to an area. Many areas I looked at have been updated in the last couple of months.

Coverage in the rural areas isn’t as good as some of the alternatives though so you might still need Google Earth.

Where is all this? Go to Nearmap and explore.

Mobile Boost

I’ve mentioned before that I have a mobile (aka. wireless but not to be confused with wifi)) broadband modem I use when I am out and about. It is very useful for things like meetings and when travelling. One problem I have found though is that there are some areas that don’t have good coverage. I often use it at a friends place and there the signal is quite variable. Sometimes it will work but usually it won’t maintain a connection there.

In an attempt to solve this I recently purchased an antenna for the modem. Some modems have a port to plug in an antenna and fortunately my Huawei E169 does. It arrived in a couple of days which is great service. I plugged it in and the signal strength seemed higher and steadier. It has a desktop base and a clip that will clip to the netbook’s screen. It fitted well without touching the actual screen too.

The real test came a few days later when I was at my friends place again. I was able to connect and maintain a workable connection. A great improvement. I don’t use it all the time but in the places I need it it is invaluable.

I don’t say it will allow a connection everywhere but in areas where there is a signal but it isn’t strong enough to use the antenna will make a difference.

Election Info

If you live in Australia and don’t yet have information overload on the election you should seek help! But for now Google is providing a dedicated election page with links to voting info, YouTube channels and much more.

If you can’t help yourself have a look here.

Browsing

I haven’t been here for a while, I know, so here is something I’ve found recently. I have been using Firefox as my main browser since before it reached ver 1 but lately I felt it was getting slower. I have tried a few others, Konquerer, the default browser on KDE is quite good but had some problem with a couple of sites. I really liked Arora but I had become addicted to some of the add-ons in Firefox and Arora is a no frills browser.

Then I found Chrome by Google. Chrome is based on the open source Chromium and is easily the fastest browser I have used. It is still in beta, well it is a Google product, but I’ve found it quite stable.

Best of all it has most of the popular extensions that have made Firefox so powerful. Some of them are also still in development. I’ve had problems syncing with Xmarks, for example. I replaced the Gmail signature add-on I was using with Autopen which is much better. One disappointment is that Cooliris is only available for Windows at the moment. A linux and Mac version has been promised for a while but is still to appear.

I’ve had no problem getting You Tube to work and downloads seem to be handled better than Firefox too. One thing I would like to change is to have Chrome more integrated into the desktop. It doesn’t pick up display properties from the desktop but uses it’s own. Still I would recommend it, give it a try.

Mandatory Internet Filter

It seems our government is ignoring all the advice the contrary and public opinion and aiming to introduce mandatory filtering with the legislation coming before parliament later next year. Of course they are hiding behind the child pornography issue but many people don’t realise that much more will be blocked.

The Google blog covered this in a reasonable article here. Well worth your time to read it if you are concerned about basic rights in this country.

Gmail Signatures – Updated

Update. Since I posted this I have found the add-on again. In fact it is now available from the Mozilla Add-Ons site. There is a new home page for it too.

I posted some time ago about Firefox add-ons. One I mentioned was Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures which allowed you to have different signatures for each Gmail account. Unfortunately it is no longer available on the Mozilla site. There is no mention of it on the Blank Canvas site either.

This is a great loss as it is the only Gmail signature add-on that supported multiple accounts. There are other add-ons for signatures but none of them have this feature. The xpi file can still be found on archive sites, a search should bring up a source for you.

Hopefully one of the other add-ons will add this feature or even better Gmail itself will provide it.

Credit where it is Due

I have criticised Optus in the past when I had problems with my mobile broadband so it is only fair to give credit when they get it right.

As a result of the storms the other night, al least I guess it was the storms could have been a totally unrelated problem, I lost all mobile phone and broadband reception at home. I called them to report it and after describing the situation, my phone could see distant towers weakly for short periods and both being out, they agreed it was most likely a network issue. They said they had several problems in the Sydney area but our local area hadn’t been reported. They would get a tech to investigate but it could take up to 48 hours to resolve. Not something to look forward to.

Anyway less than 10 hours later I had gotten into the habit of checking my phone every so often and there was a full signal this time. I had internet and working well too.

Well done Optus.

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Fedora, Mobile Broadband and Conky

It was over 12 months ago that I blogged about using my Optus mobile broadband with Fedora. I’ve noticed there have been a few searches on that subject recently so I thought it was about time I updated.

With Fedora 11

When I first plugged the 3g modem in it generated a SELinux error and I had to set SELinux to permissive to get it working. That is no longer the case with Fedora 11. Nor does it load the modem as an usb drive. It is recognised as a modem and Network Manager just handles it.

I must add that this seems to apply only to Fedora. I have tried it in Mandriva and Ubuntu derivatives like Gos and only Mint has worked.

This will improve in Fedora 12 with a new feature that will automatically set up the requirements for each provider. Looks like a great feature for those who need to change the default settings.

Working with Conky

Conky is a very useful system monitor. I have often thought of doing a post on Conky but in the interim I’ll just talk about monitoring the Mobile Broadband.

When I first  set up the Mobile Broadband I couldn’t get Conky to report on it. I tried “dmesg | grep usb” and it reported that the modem was using ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1 and ttyUSB2. However none of these would report any activity. Searching around I found that these were redirecting to ppp0. I can’t remember where I found this but it has been consistent across multiple Fedora versions and computers. I can now see the current activity on the Internet connection.

If it is useful here is the code I added to my .conkyrc to get it working

${color0}INTERNET $color(${addr ppp0}) ${color0}${hr 2}$color
${color1}Down:$color  ${downspeed ppp0} KB/s${alignr}${color1}Up:$color ${upspeed ppp0} KB/s
${downspeedgraph ppp0 25,120 color1 color2} ${alignr}${upspeedgraph ppp0 25,120 color1 color2}$color
${color1}Downloaded: $color${totaldown ppp0} $alignr ${color1}Uploaded: $color${totalup ppp0}

Hope that helps.